Just finished rereading this as my Christmas Classic (Martin Chuzzlewit was my Summer one) - totally brilliant and accurate about society today and the way we are going. I started off thinking it wasn't as good as Orwell's 1984 and ended up feeling that though Orwell's story is better, Huxley's structure and tone are superb. Do reread it - or read it if you haven't already.

I think 1984 and Brave New World complement each other well. Together they represent, respectively, the stick and the carrot approach to keeping a grip on people. It's easy to see methods from both novels at work in UK society in particular.

Huxley was prescient in many ways. Science and consumer culture are on the way to divorcing sex from reproduction and familial love, as he predicted.

Unlike him, I don't think that's a bad thing. And he was wrong in the way he put it together with his theory of state control - or at least he got it the wrong way around. In today's societies, governments are not using the seperation of sex and reproduction to tighten control. They are tightening control in response to the seperation of sex from reproduction. For example, absurd laws on virtual child pornography that criminilize virtually every man (if you have looked at a pic in a newspaper of Miley Cyrus dressed sexily or pole dancing, you have 'viewed child pornography'). Or in Sweden, where men can be charged with rape over burst condoms.

Of course you might argue that Governments are happy to exploit the sexualised society in order to increase power over people, but I think it's more a case of technology (such as the internet, and the contraceptive pill) simply driving forward a sexually open society which conservative and feminist groups simply can't stop, no matter how many laws they introduce. But in their efforts to stop it, more and more liberty is being taken away from us.

If you like Huxley, you might also like the novels of Michel Houellebecq, who discusses the same issues in an up-to-date sort of way. Also, the following website is very interesting as a critique of Huxely, and a transhumanist defense of the idea of 'paradise engineering' - www.huxley.net/